Many applications exist which enhance browsing and searching experiences by providing complementary presentations of the content such as a thumbnail view of the web pages or summaries and concepts extracted from the page content. For example, applications are available which provide an easy way for a user to identify and navigate to potentially relevant parts of a document by displaying thumbnails of the document with the position of keywords/phrases highlighted or otherwise indicated. In another example, thumbnails may be used in presenting a user's navigation history (i.e. the web pages that were accessed and the order in which they were accessed).
A simple technique for thumbnail generation involves capturing the content of the browser window space as soon as a web page has completely loaded. This captured image may then be stored as a bitmap and displayed as a thumbnail as required. However, in many cases the web page is larger than the portion which is visible on screen and therefore the thumbnail will not represent the whole web page.